Hollywood Gothic (29 page)

Challis thanked him for all the help.

“It’s been a pleasure, Tobias. Anytime. And I’m delighted that you’re alive and well after the plane crash. I’m building quite a nice murder file on you. Did you kill her, by the way? None of my business, I realize …”

“Justice is blind,” Challis said.

“Ah, that good lady. She’s not at home hereabouts, I’m afraid.” He wheezed happily.

“Is Simon Karr still alive, Vernon?”

“Aha, I thought you’d never ask. Yes, he’s still alive. More or less. Sequestered in a very fancy hostelry for the old, the infirm, and—I’m told—gangsters on the lam. That last bit may be apocryphal. And may not. Do you know where Marineland is? Well, you get out that way, south of there, its Rancho Mafioso something. No, no, merely an attempt at levity … it’s not far from San Clemente, not too far from La Costa … Pacifica House, I believe. Not to be confused with Mr. Nixon’s home.” He wheezed another laugh and saw them to the door. “Good-bye, Miss Dyer. Take good care of my old friend Tobias Challis. Don’t let Hollywood do him any great harm.”

T
HE OCEAN EXPLODED LIKE BLUE-GREEN
crystal on the reddish-brown rocks at the base of the cliffs. The breeze blew cool, moist fog from the direction of Catalina, and the pots of flowers hanging from the awning braces swayed like colorful dancers in an old movie. Behind the fog the sun burned yellow and cast a Renoir softness across the long flagstone walkway and the lazy expanse of Pacific. Turning back toward the long, elegant white hacienda crowning the slope of green perfectly trimmed grass, Challis saw the old people in bathrobes, nightgowns, leotards, bathing suits, and wheelchairs promenading on the veranda. One old codger wore an ice-cream suit, a broad-brimmed white hat, white shoes, smoked a long greenish panatella. A male attendant separated from the slow-moving crowd of Fellini extras and set off down the path of finely crushed pink stone. He was pushing a wheelchair which contained an old man, or what was left of one. There were no legs. There was an eyepatch. There was a mane of white hair, a hearing aid, and knuckles broken and rearranged by arthritis. Morgan was breathing the fresh air, humming under her breath.

The attendant slid the wheelchair to a stop. He was a tanned beach-and-surf type, healthy and eager to please. “Morning,” he said with a smile like ivory in the klieg lights. “This is Mr. Simon Karr. Mr. Streeter, Miss Dyer … have a nice chat. I’ll just go along and have a chair over on the lawn. Call me when you’re all through. Enjoy yourselves and let me know if you’d like any iced tea, just anything—”

“Go, for Chrissakes, Duke, we get the idea.” Simon Karr’s voice was larger than the remnant of his physical self.

“Yessir—”

“You’re a nice boy but you talk too much.” He cocked his small, shrunken head beneath the waving white pompadour, and looked at Challis. “Whoever the hell you are, pal, you got here in the nick of time. I could do my last buck and wing at any moment. And don’t sing no sad songs for me, as the man said. I am ready … how are you, miss? May I say that you are one foxy lady? Is that the proper colloquialism? I must rely on
Baretta
and
Starsky and Hutch
to keep up with the outside world, so you can appreciate how much trouble I’m in … but, what can I do for you? You mentioned crazy old Vernon Purcell—does he still smell so bad? I’ve never visited his cage, but word gets around.”

“It’s pretty fragrant,” Morgan said.

“Not so loud, sister. You’ve learned about hearing aids from Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride pictures. This little bastard is like a CIA bug, picks up everything … Duke over there farts, pardon my French, and I’ll hear it over here. There’s no escape unless I unhook, some big temptation with the kinda bullshit, you should pardon me again, they talk around this joint … unhook, unplug, and shove off, that’s my motto. So what can I do for you?”

“Vernon told me that you did a special job for Maximus Pictures back in forty-seven, a little reverse PR, keep something out of the papers … ring any bells?”

“Solly Roth, is he dead yet?”

“No, not by quite a hell of a long way.”

“Too bad. I never particularly liked Sol. He was such a sanctimonious old turd, even when he was younger. Miss, you’re just going to have to excuse my French. Seems I can’t get through a fucking sentence—see there, that’s what I mean—without resorting to illiterate vulgarity. Ah, yes, Solly Roth and his wimp of a son. Christ in heaven, what a wet bunch that family was. Except for Kay. Now, there was a girl with spunk. Until the Wimp wore her down. Am I telling tales out of school? Well, so what, eh? Who cares? In a week I’ll be dead! With any luck, let me add. Did I do anything for Solly in forty-seven? Hell, yes, I held him up is what I did. Fifty grand to put the lid on a murder and an embezzlement … guy’s name was lemme see, Morton? Was that it?”

“Morpeth,” Challis said.

“You know why I couldn’t stand Solly? I’ll tell you. He never worked on the holidays, always went to temple, did the whole shtick, which is fine, but you know how you get a feeling about a guy? Well, I always had the idea that Solly did that just for show, y’know? That he didn’t really give a fuck one way or the other … which just boils down to I didn’t like the putz, don’t tell me.” His one eye blinked, momentarily confused. His head swiveled from side to side like a ventriloquist’s dummy and a fist knotted against the arm of the wheelchair. “You know, miss, I look at you, you know what I think of? Nooky, I think of nooky … I remember nooky surprisingly well for a man as far gone as I am. Does she remind you of nooky, young man? Eh?”

“Incessantly, Mr. Karr … but about you and Solomon Roth and Morpeth … what was the story?”

“Story? No story … the little schmuck, some kinda English war hero, stole a million or so from Solly … we figured his accomplices knocked him off and took all the money.”

“Who filled in the blanks?”

“Solly and I, we worked on it together. We just tried to figure it out … funny thing how it was all sort of in the family, though that helped, to be perfectly frank.”

“All in the family,” Challis said. “What does that mean?”

“Well, it was a friend of Morpeth’s who identified the body. His wife … well, Priscilla—say, is she still alive? What a crazy bunch they were … is she? Still alive, eh?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Karr. Go on.”

“Well, Priscilla was weird, told fortunes and read tea leaves, always wearing a sheet with stars painted on it … had a little storefront place on Sunset, the part down by Elysian Park, Dodger Stadium. God, what a zoo. Anyway, this crazy Priscilla was acting like an idiot, fainting spells, the fucking vapors, so Morpeth’s old chum, been his teacher or something, or knew him at Rank … anyway, this friend of Morpeth’s wound up working for Solly, the guy who identified Morpeth’s body for Priscilla—”

“Who went to work for Solomon Roth?”

“Everybody involved, actually … Morpeth’s pal was what’s-his-name, that stuffy majordomo type from central casting …” He shrugged jerkily as if the movement hurt him.

“Graydon,” Challis said. “Herbert Graydon.”

“He’s the one, went into the morgue and told ’em sure, that’s old Morpeth … Herbert Graydon. A class act, Herbert. Pompous stuffy old cunt.” He hawked and spit onto the pink path.

“How did you keep it quiet, Mr. Karr?” Morgan’s voice had a soothing effect on the old man. He lifted one runny eye and twisted his bleached lips into a smile.

“The way I always kept things quiet. They always thought I was this magician type who could fix anything … that’s why my price was so high, eh? Shit, I just paid everybody off … cops mainly. It didn’t take much, either. A grand here and there, a man could buy a new car for a grand in the old days … or take his family on a nice vacation. I suppose I used three, four grand of Solly’s fifty getting mouths shut, a reasonable business expense. Now, that particular case, Morpeth, was another man who went to work for Solly … we always had our little chats up in Griffith Park or down in Chinatown or out by the water, we’d eat little cardboard containers of shrimp and walk along the Santa Monica pier and I’d tell him what I was trying to keep quiet and why, he was an honorable man but he was open to this kind of whatchamacallit,
blandishment.
I’d tell him my side of it, what kind of money was involved, and he’d tell me if it was the kind of investigation he could soft pedal. He was homicide, of course, and the funny thing was, he said homicides were the easiest ones to quash, said nobody really gave a good goddamn about most homicides … he worked on the Black Dahlia thing, did some technical advisory work on some pictures, was a hell of a cop, and in his spare time fixed a thing or two here and there for Simon Karr … like Morpeth.” The old man, his memory and appetite whetted, slumped back exhausted, lips working against one another as if chewing an invisible string, knuckles fluttering on the arms of the wheelchair.

“Tully Hacker,” Challis said.

The old head nodded spasmodically. “Tully Hacker,” he whispered. “Tell me, young man, is he still alive? He … seemed like a man … who knew how … to stay alive but … he was in a dangerous … line of work.” The fronds of a Boston fern blew near the old man’s face, trying to caress him. A nice gesture. “But people get old … and die.” He sighed. “Most everybody dead, of course … pussy, I close this eye … dream about pussy. They better have … pussy … where I’m going …” He gasped softly. Morgan strolled along the railing to the cliff’s edge, motioned unobtrusively to Duke, who nodded, got up at once. “The real article,” Simon Karr concluded, fell silent, his one eyelid drooping like a crumpled tissue. He was asleep, and Duke rolled him away.

Heading back through the fog sweeping the freeway, Morgan asked him what came next.

“The only thing I’m sure I can’t do is stop,” Challis said. “We’ve got the diaries that show Aaron to have been a shit, we’ve got a ton of checks written to Priscilla Morpeth by Kay Roth, Goldie, and Jack Donovan over a period of nearly a quarter of a century. And we know that Priscilla’s husband, Morty, was murdered in 1947 … that
he
embezzled Maximus money …” Challis cranked the Mustang’s side window down, sniffed. “I think this heap has got an exhaust leak coming into the car. God, what have I come to?” He sighed, took a deep breath.

“What do you make of all the supporting players getting into it? The butler, for God’s sake—maybe he did it, Toby!”

“You never know. Anything can happen in Hollywood.”

“And Tully Hacker … I mean, he’s the one who actually covered up, or stifled or whatever, the murder of Morpeth. And now he’s Solomon Roth’s security man. More than that, Toby—you made it sound like he’s practically a member of the family.”

“He is. Almost. The Roths are like a family from another century. Tully plays a lot of roles, carries the burden of their lives. He’s the bodyguard, sure, but he’s also like an adviser, even a priest who’s always at hand. To hear their confessions, to accept their guilt and fear … he wears it all so easily.”

Morgan said, “It’s because he knows how unimportant their guilt and fear are. Don’t you see? He’s a man of action, living in a world where … where … well, you told me about hanging people upside down over bridges. He just gets to the point, doesn’t worry about things—the perfect priest, Toby. Everybody else is scared and weak. Not Tully. He fixes things.”

“You have, I think, grasped the essentials of his mission in life.” He grinned at her.

“Do I really make you think about nooky?” She stared straight ahead into the blowing fog, her face composed and solemn.

“Absolutely,” he said.

She began to smile at the fog.

They stopped for lunch at a franchised diner stamped out of Styrofoam and plastic, much like the food itself. You were faceless there at the end of Wilshire Boulevard, the palm trees watching for the Japanese fleet to materialize out of the fog, the smell of salt and fishiness on the wind, the hamburgers hiding under the goo that was supposed to give them a flavor.

Challis fished a nickel and a dime from his pocket and got the first
Herald-Examiner
from a sidewalk box. He lost his appetite on page three.

PUBLISHER FOUND SHOT

FOUL PLAY INDICATED

Jack Donovan’s picture was a little grainy, taken from a sideways angle that thinned the fleshiness from his heavy face. The news had obviously broken too late for any details of the murder beyond the simple fact that his body had been found by his housekeeper, who had arrived on the yacht in Castle Moon Bay shortly after seven o’clock in the morning. There followed a brief recapitulation of Donovan’s recent career, clearly drawn from the material which would make up the full-length obit bound to appear in later editions.

Morgan read it, chewed suspiciously on her cheeseburger. “It’ll put you back in their minds, Toby. They’ll start making connections and go back at old Ralph with the Bandersnatch stuff and come hounding me again. They’ll go to the Roths and your agent and they’ll eventually figure out something about this strange, unidentified man … they’ll find out you had a punch-up with Donovan at my party and they’ll remember that the description tallies with the guy standing in my living room for the first time they came to see me … and they’re going to discover that Eddie Streeter is some kid parking cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The thing is, Toby, it’s not going to take them very long. God help us if they find any fingerprints on Jack’s boat. Open-and-shut. Both of us.”

They looked at the food, at the imitation leather upholstery, the people eating in apparent trances. They looked out at the fog and the traffic on Wilshire and the first of the day’s rain budding on the plate glass.

“Not much time, then,” he said finally. “And no place safe.”

She nodded.

“And I still don’t know what I’m really looking for.”

“If you just keep at it, maybe it’ll find you.”

“How long would you say I’ve got?”

“Not long, Toby, not long. Look, what about getting out now? Couldn’t you go back to Ollie Kreisler? Or that Pete, the newspaperman? Or—there’s no point in kidding ourselves—the Roths … and Mr. Hacker. They could do it, they could help you get away.”